Category: Radio

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The "Hat" Is Familiar

Well, I don’t drive. Sitting in the car for a few hours, as I have been on two separate trips to the south of Wales these last few days, and failing to make scintillating company for my partner at the wheel, I pass the time that always seems longer when the body is at rest while in motion by listening to comedy and quiz programs on BBC 4. Quick, witty, and thoroughly radiogenic, shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute continue to provide the kind of smart broadcast entertainment introduced in America back in 1938, when Information, Please! premiered on the CBS radio network.

Like those present day BBC offerings, the Information, Please! program relied in part on well-known guest panelists, mainly writers and entertainers, publicly to make fools of themselves for our private amusement. Now, Information, Please! is still a darn good quiz program; but I tend to listen to it for information other than that requested by host Clifton Fadiman. The program sure tests the memory. It also attests to the transitory nature of what constitutes the memorable and the retrievable, trivia and common knowledge.

To me, the most intriguing questions of Information, Please! are raised by the very voices and names of those who answer. On this day, 18 July, in 1939, Information, Please! featured the voice of one Clarence Budington Kelland. Apparently, the speaker was deemed popular enough to become a celebrity guest guesser. Not only did he join a long list of Information Pleasers including Lilian Gish, Gracie Allen, Rex Stout, and Alfred Hitchcock, he was invited to return and second guess.

On an earlier edition of Information, Please! (the transcript of which was included in an anthology of Best Broadcasts), Kelland was introduced as an “ever popular” author “whose stories and novels have delighted millions” (23 May 1939). While it is clear that those millions did not bother to pass on their delights to future generations, it remains open to speculation just when the “ever popular” made way for “whatever,” the yawn of indifference.

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This [I believe] I Believe

Perhaps we are becoming rather blasé about the phenomenon of web journalism (commonly known and often derided as “blogging”). Many of us still write what we wish, refusing to succumb to the urge or promise of making monetary profits by agreeing to become the mouthpieces of commerce, thereby to surrender the opportunity of sharing something about ourselves other than our apparent greed. How much is it worth to you to write freely, to display whatever you are pleased and prepared to share, what you think, think you know or believe?

It used to be a rare chance indeed to make yourself heard in a public forum comprising of more than a room full of people. The media who can spread news or opinions beyond the small circle of our communities, they always seem to be owned or run by others, be it likeminded or otherwise. That sense of being removed or apart from the media is largely a misconception, at least in democratic societies, a misconception arising from the distrust or apathy of the individual who does not participate, let alone initiate debates. And yet, what went on the air was generally prepared for the listener-turned-consumer by those who chose to enter the radio industry, whether to teach, delight, or exploit.

How exciting it must have sounded to the radio listener of 1951 when a program called This I Believe premiered on CBS, soon to be heard by American and international audiences the world over. This week, BBC Radio 4 is offering an hourlong introduction to This I Believe, its origins, its creators (among them Edward R. Murrow, pictured above), and its participants—an eclectic group of housewives and luminaries).

So, what if you were given four and a half minutes—or no more than 600 words—publicly to express your beliefs (something thousands have done since the revival of This I Believe in 2003)? What would you say? Would you find the words—and the courage—to say it?

However easy it is to say I, I believe that it should take more than a moment’s haphazarding to examine and express one’s philosophy, provided such a philosophy, which lies beyond performance and conformity, can be formulated at all. Yes, it is far easier to say “I” than it is to add “believe” and to follow it with words that truly follow . . .

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A Ramble of Epic Proportions: Wordsworth in Wales

Well, I suppose we have all taken trips that have changed our lives. After all, why else go anywhere! If it had not been for a New York City subway ride and a brisk walk to Rockefeller Center on an afternoon in December, I would never have ended up here in Wales (a virtual tour of which is being attempted in this 1930s radio broadcast). Indeed, I would not have been able to spot Wales on a map, even though I, a student of English literature, believed myself to be familiar with one of the most famous poems to have been inspired by the Welsh countryside: Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”

It was on this day, 13 July, back in 1798, that Wordsworth revisited the Wye valley in Monmouthshire, Wales, where Tintern Abbey stands in its Romanticism-inspiring ruins (as shown left, in a more prosaic picture from my first visit there).

Wordsworth had been at the same spot some five summers earlier, together with his sister, Dorothy. He felt himself aged and believed himself matured. It had been a memorable journey; indeed, as he remarked in his notes on the poem, no work of his was “composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember.” The memory of the trip and of his “boyish days” were very much on his mind on his return to the scene, a landscape revisited not simply per pedes, but, in a less pedestrian sense, in recollection.

“[H]ow oft,” he recalled in his famous poem, in lines that would change the course of literary history,

In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—  
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

It was a vision of a landscape that recurred to Wordsworth, “in lonely rooms” and “‘mid the din / Of towns and cities.” A “worshipper of nature,” he had little to say about the Abbey itself, a ruin that inspired many an artist, most notably Turner, Wordsworth’s contemporary. This Sunday, I am going to travel down to Monmouthshire in the knowledge that my days in the Welsh countryside are numbered.

It seems I am moving back into town this fall, after nearly three years in the Welsh countryside. A small town, mind you, but a town nonetheless. It was peaceful here, and pleasant in the sunshine. Yet there has hardly been any sunshine this summer, nor warmth; and the loneliness of our house has at times been a burden to me, and to those having to suffer my presence.

Without this intensely felt isolation I would perhaps not have commenced the broadcastellan journal. Before moving to Wales, I was not aware of how much our surroundings enter our being, of how much a landscape can inhabit or possess, rather than merely surround us. Now, would the Romantic movement have come into being had Wordsworth’s second summer in Wales been as much of a washout as the present season?

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Tintin Foiled?

Holy Mackerel and Blistering Barnacles! Intrepid boy reporter Tintin is under attack. Recently honored in Belgium and soon to become a Spielberg franchise, the byliner turned video and radio star is now being held accountable for his exploits in the Congo. Tintin in the Congo has been denounced by Britain’s independent but government sponsored Commission for Racial Equality as “racist claptrap.” Some booksellers have responded to such claims by moving the comic to the adult graphic novel section.

Tintin, it should be recalled, forged an interracial friendship during his adventures in Tibet (which I hope to be experiencing in the Old Vic stage production later this year) and fought against ethnic stereotyping while retrieving the Castafiore Emerald. Still, the much revised Tintin in the Congo—which dates back to the time when Amos ‘n’ Andy were on the American wireless, Josephine Baker wore bananas, and Al Jolson cried for his “Mammy”—might tell a different story altogether.

I revisited Hergé’s depiction of what Nigger of the “Narcissus” author Joseph Conrad called the Heart of Darkness to debate with myself whether the book’s read-at-your-own-risk label (“an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find offensive”) should suffice or whether Tintin ought to be canned.

Tintin in the Congo is an imperialist, colonial adventure story; but its hero does not come to conquer a continent. He is merely there to see and capture it in his reports. Along the way, he gets into some terrible scrapes, kills a few wild animals, and saves a few natives (or is saved by them). Sure, the Africa visited by Tintin is a caricature, its inhabitants grotesque. So, for that matter, are the white villains, American gangsters with ties to Al Capone.

Is Tintin in the Congo a story likely to turn its readers into Lynx and Lamb (you know, the white supremacist teen-duo known as Prussian Blue)? Should it be going the way of Enid Blyton’s Three Golliwogs (Golly, Woggie, and Nigger), an un(re)publishable book by a bestselling author? I don’t know what is worse: xenophobia or revisionism, yesterday’s blackface or the whitewashings of the present.

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Anxious for Her Next Close-up, Gloria Swanson Murders "By the Book"

She might have been auditioning for Sunset Blvd. or hoping for some such comeback; then again, she sounded as if acting lay in a distant, silent past. Screen legend Gloria Swanson, I mean, who, on this day, 10 July, in 1947, stepped behind the microphone to make her only appearance on CBS radio’s Suspense series in a thriller titled ”Murder by the Book (a clip of which I appropriated for one of my old-time radio podcasts).

Swanson (pictured above in a scene from Music in the Air [1934]) plays a mystery writer suffering from dizzy spells, memory loss, and nervous tension, ever since her husband’s death by drowning. She’d been seeing a doctor about it; but he died as well. “You see, he has been murdered,” she declares, narrating her story. Still, she is determined to continue her latest book, a thriller “about a woman who kills her husband”; but, she admits, she’s been having “all kinds of trouble with the end. Everything was all right up until the explanation.”

For the sake of publicity, and to get her mind off her troubled new volume, she agrees to her publisher’s suggestion to turn reporter and cover her doctor’s murder, much to the distress of her stepdaughter. “She’d always been a little strange,” Swanson’s character remarks. Then again, she’s the one with the dizzy spells.

Swanson, you will agree, was not very assured in her reading of her lines, and at times scans the script downright carelessly. Then again, her best years had been silent ones. Nevertheless, she succeeds in turning the character of Emily into one cooky dame. Since we sense from the start that she cannot be trusted, the pleasure of listening to Robert L. Richard’s “Murder by the Book” lies in hearing her fall apart. It’s a fine premise for the kind of movie thriller many an aging Hollywood diva would take on in the 1950. Ready or not, Swanson had one glorious last close-up in her future . . .

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The Extinguished Lamp; or, Do You See Florence Nightingale?

I have been frequently miscast in the story of my life. And matters weren’t always helped by my being in charge of the casting. I was never more out of my element, which is neither quite earth nor air, as during those twenty months of civil service that I spent vaguely resembling a nurse’s aide. The stethoscope dangling around my neck may have fooled some of the patients some of the time; but my half-hearted attempts at hospital corners soon ruined whatever impression such a prop could have made upon them. Not that Hollywood fares any better in its imitations of strife, even though more harm comes to the reputation of the nursing profession than to the sick and injured by giving the so-called White Angel a tint of the Blue. Unless cast in minor roles, Hollywood nurses are as glamorous and rhinestonian as showgirls.

How much more realistic might the portrayal of those bed-pans carrying pulse-takers be once the pressure of making them look pretty—rather than the part—is removed? I asked myself that while listening to “White Angel,” broadcast on this day, 9 July, in 1946. Adapted for radio’s Encore Theater from the 1936 melodrama of the same title, the play stars Virginia Bruce (pictured) in the role of Florence Nightingale (impersonated on the screen by Kay Francis).

Even with the lights switched off, it was difficult for me to get the image of Ms. Bruce out of my head, to picture a nurse among the suffering and picture her suffering among them. As the title, “White Angel,” suggests, the portrait is altogether too clean to be genuine. At best, it is a eulogy, as idealized as Longfellow’s “Santa Filomena”:

A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.

Hollywood stars never truly disappeared when they stepped behind the microphone; not only did their names conjure up their faces, but their voices bespoke their presence. If sponsors paid for the services of a Ms. Bruce, they insisted on her sounding like Ms. Bruce. The audience, likewise, expected no less. Ms. Bruce does not disappoint; which means, of course, that she is altogether unconvincing as Ms. Nightingale. There is not a bead of sweat, not a drop of blood in her performance. Hers is the dignity of a socialite, of a lady serving cocktails rather than mankind in the Crimean.

“Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity—these three—and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” Ms. Nightingale once asked. Hollywood could take you places, but it got you there in high heals and concealed the calluses. Reality, in the case of the Encore Theater, entered the stage only for a curtain call, during which Ms. Bruce spoke on behalf of the sponsor, the drug company Schenley Laboratories. Not to push penicillin, whose healing powers were extolled during the commercial break, but to urge the “Women of America” to do something more worthwhile than to dream of being Virginia Bruce:

“Today the need for nurses is desperate. If you are a high school graduate between the ages of 17 and 35, in good health, apply at the hospital nearest your home. Remember, nursing is one of the highest vocations a woman can follow.” After which bit of practical pathos the actress exited the broadcasting studio with a check for services rendered. Did any young woman walk into a hospital that week, saying “Virginia Bruce” sent me? And how many stuck it out not cursing the “White Angel” thereafter? I wonder.

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Thanks for the Autograph. Now, Who the Hell Are You?

Don’t tell me. You’ve had a great time at the beach, enjoyed a picnic with friends and family, followed by a splendid fireworks display on a balmy evening. I mean it, don’t tell me! It’s been raining here for, let’s see, about three weeks, ever since my return from New York City; and today I read a forecast telling me that, after the “wettest June since records began,” July here in Britain is going to be a washout and that August and September “will not be worth waiting for.” Is it any wonder I am becoming more cantankerous by the minute?

To keep it gay, I dug up (and Ted Turnerized) this autograph a friend of mine from the indubitably sunnier and less lugubrious San Francisco sent me a few years ago. His mother was an avid radio listener and autograph hunter back in the pre-Television age I set out to recall in this journal. Previously, I’ve raided her collection for images of Baby Rose Marie, Rudy Vallee, and the Merry Macs.

So, who is this Del Casino? I reckon he is the same chap the Internet Movie Database insists on calling “Del Cansino,” a once popular singer whose star is rather a dark one by now. Perhaps that is not such an apt metaphor, considering that dark stars are at least detectable by their radio emissions, of which, in the case of Mr. Casino, there appear to be none.

Here he is, in an early 1940s “soundie,” crooning the pretty if none too memorable ”One Look at You.” You’d be able to tell a lot from one look at me just now; but you probably wouldn’t end up writing love songs about it. I’ll try to snap out of this mood and vow to return in good cheer anon.

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The Bourne Imperative

Well, I’m not sure whether I could stomach Lorna Luft and Dallas alumnus Ken Kercheval in a touring production of White Christmas; but Matthew Bourne’s Bizet ballet The Car Man was certainly worth a trip to the splendid Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru (Wales Millennium Centre) in Cardiff Bay. Inspired by James M. Cain’s oft-adapted 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (revived on 24 January 1952 on Hollywood Sound Stage, starring radio stalwart Richard Widmark), The Car Man is set in mid-20th century small town America (the fictional Harmony, pop. 375), The Car Man tells the story of the titular drifter who falls for the accommodating wife of his new boss (a vixen named Lana, after the actress who played her in the 1946 film version). Though easily duped, the cuckold is bound to find out, eventually, and to be less than accepting of the triangular situation.

Unlike his whimsical if choreographically frivolous Edward Scissorhands (my impressions of which I shared previously), Bourne’s earlier Car Man is proper dance theater, with an exceptional performance by Michela Meazza as Lana.

While firmly within the tradition of 19th-century melodrama without resorting to camp, The Car Man bears no resemblance to Carmen. Indeed, the story as told in movement, light, and a generous amount of stage blood is far easier to follow than that of Bizet’s opera or the Prosper Mérimée novella upon which it is based, a plot comedian Ed Wynn insisted on translating for the listening audience of Tallulah Bankhead’s radio variety program The Big Show on 26 November 1950, as opera star Lauritz Melchior struggled to perform Pagliacci: “And as the curtain rises, we see Carmen walking out of the cigarette factory. We know it’s a cigarette factory because there are doctors walking in and out of the building.”

Those medical practitioners, of course, were meant to endorse tobacco rather than treat the workers or assess the risks of smoking.

“Carmen has many admirers,” Wynn continued, “and to each one of them she has given a lock of her hair. Isn’t that beautiful? So, Carmen, or as she is now called by her friends, Baldy, [. . .].”

Not that Mr. Wynn could have possibly prepared me for the theatrical experience of The Car Man. In keeping with his celebrated all-male revision of Swan Lake, the old love triangle has been colored pink; or, rather, it is getting another—an outré—angle, as Bourne tosses a male admirer of Lana’s lover into the bloody mix of lust, jealousy, and murder. Being granted views of a communal shower, a private bedroom, and life behind bars—or wherever else you might expect intimate encounters of the same and opposite sex on a sultry evening, Bourne’s audiences can and should expect the full bodyworks.

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Cheerio, Helen Keller!

Well, I’m not exactly a “shut-in”; but being visited by a late bout of seasonal allergies and looking out, red eyed and slightly hung over, at what has been declared the rainiest June on record, I sure can relate to The Story of Cheerio, a copy of which 1936 autobiography I picked up at the rare books room at Manhattan’s legendary Strand earlier this month. According to the cover, Cheerio is the “intimate story of radio’s most beloved character who has dedicated his life to the spreading of cheer, hope and kindliness. With inspiring human stories from the homes of his radio audience of ‘shut-ins.”

Seems like someone shut up this hero of the homebound, Charles K. Field, whom former president Herbert Hoover applauded for his “altruistic” use of the radio, but of whose fifteen years in broadcasting little survives today. A vintage recording of Cheerio in action can be heard at the close of the 19 September 1956 edition of Recollections at Thirty. Now, I’m not sure how much sentiment I can take on a biliously rebellious stomach; but I’m glad I decided to leaf through this as yet unread volume yesterday, when I came across this letter from Helen Keller, who was born on this day, 27 June, in 1880. It is a birthday letter, no less, read on the air on her 55th birthday. “Dear Cheerio,” it reads,

this is my birthday message. Please tell them I like to think God has made his shut-ins special transmitters of hope to the world. It is our lofty duty to defy the seeming omnipotence of Fate. To love. To endure. And to create, from our own wreck, the thing we desire. If we succeed in growing the sweet flowers of happiness among the rocks and crannies of our limitations, others will be inspired to nobler achievement. This alone is compensation. This is joy and victory! As I stand at the doorway of a new birthday, with its new opportunities and new tasks of faith and courage, may I ask my handicapped comrades to rejoice, with me, in that inner vision which makes us superior to outward circumstances and enables us to be one with all great ideals, all heroism, all deeds of beauty. Sincerely yours, Helen Keller.

Though not able to listen to the wireless, Keller was no stranger to the airwaves. When the story of her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, was dramatized on the Cavalcade of America program (on 2 March 1938), Keller stepped behind the microphone for a brief message to the multitude. Cheerio, Ms. Keller, for making me come back to my senses on this shot-through-gauze, shut-the-blinds, best-slept-through Wednesday afternoon.

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Shadow Players

When I read that Lamont Cranston is being resurrected for another big screen adventure scheduled to begin in 2010, I decided to catch up with one of the earlier Shadow plays. The Shadow, of course, always played well on the radio. On this day, 26 June, in 1938, he was again called into action when a “Blind Beggar Dies” after refusing to share his pittance with a gang of racketeers. The blind beggars alive to such melodrama and asking for more were millions of American radio listeners tuning in to follow the exploits of that “wealthy man about town” who was able to “cloud men’s minds” while opening them to the wonders of non-visual storytelling.

On the screen, the Shadow never quite managed to immaterialize; a previous attempt at delineating The Shadow on the screen, in the form and figure of Alex Baldwin, failed to attract audiences large enough to warrant a franchise.

Considerably less accomplished than the 1994 adaptation was the 1937 feature The Shadow Strikes, which bears little resemblance to the myth conceived for radio (initially as a mere sales gimmick for Street and Smith story magazines, publications popular during the first half of the 20th century).

At just about the time when Orson Welles made his debut in the role on radio (as mentioned here), the mysterious crime fighter was impersonated on the screen by silent screen star Rod La Rocque, whose image I came across today while leafing through the recently acquired rarity Alice in Movieland, a gossipy little volume written back in 1927, when La Rocque was still remembered as a major Cecil B. DeMille player by, well, almost everyone:

You would have thought Rod La Rocque and Vilma Banky [the silent screen star with whom La Rocque was about to tie the knot] sure to be recognized at sight anywhere short of the South Pole. But not so!

At a preview of a DeMille picture at a Hollywood theater, seats had been roped off for the stars, as one among whom La Rocque was not being recognized by the usher.

Rod and Vilma crept away. Slow fade-out! I think, however, they did contrive later to annex the two worst seats in the theatre, behind a pillar of something. But all the easier to hold hands.

One of La Rocque’s last movies, The Shadow Strikes, is strictly of the ‘slow fade’ variety, even though the character La Rocque portrayed was so in the 1930s that a follow-up was released half a year later, featuring the same leading man.

Never mind that La Rocque does not get to utter that menacing laugh and is not equipped with mental powers superior to those of other popular crimefighting acts just outside the law, the Falcon, say, or the Saint. The producers of the movie did not even bother to check the spelling of the name of his alter ego when it appeared on the cover of a newspaper.

So, what fate awaits this great figure of 20th-century popular culture? Will he return only to receive a final blow, like a beggar too impoverished to pay up? Will those who watch him on the screen follow him back to the airwaves, into the shadows where he truly belongs?